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The AI Revolution in Higher Education
The 2022–2026 institutional crisis in which AI simultaneously disrupted every function of the American research university — teaching, research, credentialing, workforce preparation — forcing the Kerrian framework into its sharpest test.
The AI revolution in higher education is the compressed institutional crisis, visible from the November 2022 release of ChatGPT through the February 2026 Rethinking Clark Kerr lecture and beyond, in which large language models simultaneously disrupted every function of the American research university. Teaching: the lecture's informational purpose redundant. Research: the answering machinery accelerated, the question-formulation capacity untouched. Credentialing: employers shifting to portfolio-based assessment. Industry connection: frontier AI labs producing foundational research at corporate scale. General education: the broad intellectual formation most undervalued for fifty years suddenly the most economically necessary offering. No single function escaped; the combination made the crisis different in kind from every previous technological challenge the university had absorbed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The crisis arrived faster than the institution's governance structures were designed to process. Faculty senates that require semesters to approve a new course had to respond to a technology whose capabilities were doubling in months. Accreditation